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Monthly Archives: May 2014

Distrust of change. If you are in a tolerable situation, and your cognitive resources are limited, it makes sense to oppose most changes, since some of them will make you worse off, and you won’t be able to tell which ones.

Insularity. Similarly, people who are similarity you will be easier to for you to predict.

People tend to follow the charisma/influence/coalition model because it makes sense in tribes, or other Dunbar number grouping, where everyone knows each other.

However, it does not scale up. Larger polities are run technocratically and bureaucratically by people largely unknown to the public, who implement plans and programmes. Policy does matter at that scale, because the choice policy is the choice of plan.

Dunbar number tribes don’t build intercontinental railroads or public cool systems. Their leaders specialise in crisis management. Our instinctive, System I judgements about who is a charismatic leader are probably well tuned to selecting good crisis managers.

Misapplying the charismatic model to advanced states results in a succession of politicians who charm but disappoint, because their technocratic skills aren’t in line with their charisma.

However, advanced states aren’t insulated from crisis. Wartime andpeacetime leaders should be selected by difference criteria.

There are difference kinds of leaders, different kinds of social groupings to be led, and different kinds of voters. The charisma-orientated gut-instinct voters are the despair of the policy wonks, forever rejecting the well laid plans of such-and-such a politician because they judge their eyes to be too close-set. But the wonks aren’t always right because character matters in a crisis.

NRs seem to think that monocultures lead to robustess due to lack of internal dissent. This isn’t even true about internal dissent, since there can be disagreement about details amimg those who e on basics. And it doesn’t begin to cover robustness again external threats. The basic problem facing any polityiws that you don’t know what is going to happen next. A hammer based monoculture is not going to be robust, because not every problem is they are to encounter will be a nail. .NRs are intent on recreating a syndrome known to have led to the downfall of many ancient societies. For instance, the Easter Islanders, whose solution to every problem was “build another statue”.

It’s in the immediate interest of healthy single people with earning potential to opt out of societies where they are required to pay a high proportion of their earnings to support families and the elderly. Whether you have the right to is not quite the question. The question is what you would be opting into. You cant stay where you are physically, because you would be free riding on infrastructure you’re refusing to pay for.

Moreover, you can’t move to Tir naNog, the land of the forever young, because biology is against you. A biologically self sustaining society will have babies and oldsters who need looking after.

But maybe it doesn’t need to be biologically self sustaining. It could have babies constant influx of young adults; they could save for their own retirements, and then be looked after by hirelings out of their own funds. They would have to be celibate, or at least in reproductive, of course.

One area they come apart is signalling, the implicit and explicit ways we tell others what kind of person we are. The instrumentally rational way is to signal is to maximise your utility by sending out agreeable signals to whichever individual or group you need something from. This Vicar-of-Bray style behaviour will lead to your making highly inconsistent statements in the limit. If you want to signal sincerity, you will need to believe them too.So you will end up with inconsistent beliefs. So,IR+signalling is inconsistent with ER.

However, all this assumes you won’t be found out. If you are scrutinised, in different siutations, by someone who cares about consistency, the benefit of inconsistent signalling vanishes.And noone is scrutinsed more than a politician in a healthy democracy. People read reports of politicians contradicting themselves and being inconsistent, and infer that politicians are unusually hypocritical. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence The ordinary persons hypocrisy is not publicised becausd the ordinary person does not have reporters following them round.

The ordinary person typically moves in a number of fairly disjoimt circles — the workplace, family, same-sex friends and so on — signaling different loyalties to each. The existence of Chinese walls is even humorously acknowledged: “what happens in X stays in X”.

Inconsisten.cy reaches a peak when communicating with completely unconnected individuals and groups. My go-to example is a telesales operative Iwho would ring various people during the crude of a day and agree with every word they said. Her customers were of course unknown to each other and in no position to compare notes,.